March 14: Democrats Really Were in Disarray Over Spending Bill
Having spent much of the week watching the runup to a crucial Senate vote on appropriations, I had to express at New York some serious misgivings about Chuck Schumer’s strategy and what it did to his party’s messaging:
For the record, I’m usually disinclined to promote the hoary “Democrats in Disarray” narrative whereby the Democratic Party is to blame for whatever nightmarish actions Republicans generally, or Donald Trump specifically, choose to pursue. That’s particularly true right now when Democrats have so little actual power and Republicans have so little interest in following laws and the Constitution, much less precedents for fair play and bipartisanship. So it really makes no sense to accuse the powerless minority party of “allowing” the assault on the federal government and the separation of powers being undertaken by the president, his OMB director Russ Vought, and his tech-bro sidekick Elon Musk. If congressional Republicans had even a shred of integrity or courage, Senate Democrats would not have been placed in the position this week of deciding whether it’s better to let the government shut down than to let it be gutted by Trump, Vought, and Musk.
Having said all that, Senate Democrats did have a strategic choice to make this week, and based on Chuck Schumer’s op-ed in the New York Times explaining his decision to get out of the way and let the House-passed spending bill come to the floor, he made it some time ago. Nothing in his series of rationalizations was new. If, indeed, “a shutdown would be the best distraction Donald Trump could ask for from his awful agenda,” while enabling the administration to exert even more unbridled power over federal programs and personnel, that was true a week ago or a month ago as well. So Schumer’s big mistake was leading Senate Democrats right up to the brink of a collision with the administration and the GOP, and then surrendering after drawing enormous attention to his party’s fecklessness.
This doesn’t just look bad and feel bad for Democrats demanding that their leaders do something to stop the Trump locomotive: It also gives the supreme bully in the White House incentive to keep bullying them, as Josh Marshall points out in his postmortem on the debacle:
“[P]eople who get hit and abused and take it tend to get hit and abused again and again. That’s all the more true with Donald Trump, a man who can only see the world through the prism of the dominating and the dominated. It is a great folly to imagine that such an abject acquiescence won’t drive him to up the ante.”
The reality is that this spending measure was the only leverage point congressional Democrats had this year (unless Republicans are stupid enough not to wrap the debt-limit increase the government must soon have in a budget reconciliation bill that cannot be filibustered). Everyone has known that since the new administration and the new Congress took office in January. If a government shutdown was intolerable, then Democrats should have taken it off the table long before the House voted on a CR. Punchbowl News got it right:
“Let’s be blunt here: Democrats picked a fight they couldn’t win and caved without getting anything in return. …
“Here’s the lesson from this episode: When you have no cards, fold them early.”
Instead, Democrats have taken a defeat and turned it into a debacle. House and Senate Democrats are divided from each other, and a majority of Senate Democrats are all but shaking their fists at their own leader, who did in fact lead them down a blind alley. While perhaps the federal courts will rein in the reign of terror presently underway in Washington (or perhaps they won’t), congressional Democrats must now become resigned to laying the groundwork for a midterm election that seems a long time away and hoping something is left of the edifice of a beneficent federal government built by their predecessors from the New Deal to the Great Society to Obamacare. There’s a good chance a decisive majority of the general public will eventually recoil from the misrule of the Trump administration and its supine allies in Congress and across the country. But at this point, elected Democrats are going to have to prove they should be trusted to lead the opposition.
W need young people and minorities turning out to vote. It’s good to see that the future has hope i’m 25 myself.
Just an observation: my 21 year old son said most of his friends from college are strongly anti-Bush and active in politics. However, he also hangs out with a large group of kids who went into blue-collar jobs after high school. Those kids are either pro-Bush or don’t care at all.
FWIW….
I don’t think Sully could ever bring himself NOT to vote for Bush. I’ve seen the way he almost breaks away and then comes rushing back for some reason or another.
I don’t really know about the others though.
By the way (a quick thought after scanning a number of well-known libertarian blogs):
Kerry/Edwards would be well advised to try to exploit the rift between social conservatives (who adore “Shrub” and “Right Wing Dick” no matter how much they screw up Iraq or the federal deficit) and libertarians. Most of the leading libertarian bloggers such as Andrew Sullivan, Jacob Levy and Dan Drezner are now leaning strongly towards voting for Kerry this year.
One nice soundbite in the current “values” flamefest would be for Kerry to publicly taunt the GOP for giving so much air time to Arnie, Rudy, John McCain as GOP convention speakers. Kerry should join forces with the Family Research Council(!) by saying the Bush Administration should show what its “values” are by giving a prominent place to guys like Ashcroft, Rick Santorum, Sam Brownback, Henry Hyde etc.. Wouldn’t it be great if the New York convention would primarily showcase bible-thumpers, homophobes and other intolerants… That was a major reason why Poppy lost the 1992 elections to Clinton; the GOP convention in Houston had to give lots of room to disgruntled social conservatives, and it scared away the moderates.
As an aside, I have always thought Ruy’s book about the “Emerging Democratic Majority” might not necessarily predict the future even if the demographic/cultural trends turn out to be correct. Doesn’t it make sense to assume the Republican Party only will start to favor socially moderate fiscal conservatives at the expense of social conservatives, when that happens? After all, Arnold Schwarzenegger, William Weld, Michael Bloomberg & Rudy Giuliani have all been successful in heavily Democratic states.
MARCU$
Well that’s great news, then. Remember: the GOP automatically benefits from a low turnout on election day plus mis-informed voters.
BTW, didn’t some polls indicate a shocking number of Americans actually believe WMDs *have* been found in Iraq and that they *were* used against U.S. troops during the invasion?? No — I am not talking about the single artillery shell containing sarin found so far. I am talking about the whole shebang that Cheney strongly “suggested” would be found in Iraq by now.
It is frustrating isn’t it? If many people can’t even tell Osama’s Afghanistan from Saddam’s Iraq, or fact from fiction in general, it’s little wonder “Shrub’s” $200-million hate campaign of mis-information is quite effective.
MARCU$
As the mother of three – ages 25, 22 and 18 – I can agree with Sean that the members of the younger generation I come into contact with are heavily involved in this year’s election. It’s a frequent topic of passionate conversation among them. This is no generic election to them – they feel their own future is in the balance.
I keep seeing the name Adam Parkhomenko showing up places. He is only 18 years old. He is the one who tried to get Hillary Rodham Clinton to run for President this year. Does anyone have any contact information for him? There is info about him here: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&q=Adam+parkhomenko
I fear that the disparity between those in the know and those not in the know will grow wider and wider in the 18-29 (though I think that’s a little too large of a lumping in my opinion).
Wonky kids are great but I really wonder if that’s a percentage which is growing.
As an 18-29 year old I don’t see too much wrong with some cyber-worshipping but then, as someone who has actually given money to political campaigns, and followed primaries since 2003, I am admittedly not a typical 18-29 year old.
The ignorance of 18-29-year-olds is, to judge from my not necessarily representative experience of living in a college town, not conspicuous by the standards of the American electorate. And I also see among them an undiminshed ability to analyze what information they do absorb. Most heartening, I’ve met a hell of a lot more wonky kids than I would have dreamed, a few years go, of existing in 2004. In the the late 1990s, we all pretty much expected a cyber-worshipping, materialistic Dark Ages to to descend when the Baby Boomers left the scene. It still might happen, but at least cautious optimism is justified now.
I predict, safely, I think, that voter participation among 18-29-year-olds this year will be at least 20 percentage points above its 2000 level, and I am willing to wager $100 that it will be 30 percentage points higher. Any takers can e-mail me to negotiate conditions:)
There was a poll that Amy Sullivan (of politicalaims.com) pointed to that showed some pretty uneducated folks out there… Though I guess it’s good that Democrats have a favourable party ID…